"Teaching children which thinking strategies are used by proficient readers and helping them use those strategies independently creates the core of teaching reading. If proficient readers routinely use certain thinking strategies, those are the strategies children must be taught. For the kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade reading curriculum to focus primarily on those strategies, we need a new instructional paradigm: Our daily work with children must look dramatically different from the approaches in wide use in our schools today." Keene, 1997, pp. 53-54
1. Monitoring comprehension
When readers monitor their comprehension, they keep track of their thinking while reading. They listen to the voice in their head that speaks to them as they read. They notice when the text makes sense or when it doesn't. We teach readers to "fix up" their comprehension by using a variety of strategies including stopping to refocus thinking, rereading, reading on. Readers who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
Be aware of what they do understand
Identify what they do not understand
Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension
2. Activating and Connecting
The background knowledge we bring to our reading influences every aspect of our learning and understanding. Background knowledge is the foundation of our thinking. We can't understand what we read without thinking about what we already know. Readers must connect the new to the known. They must "activate mental files" before reading. Sometimes, however, our prior knowledge consists of misconceptions that get in the way of new learning. So we have to prepare children not only to think about what they already know, but also to change their thinking when they encounter new and more accurate information. As children read they are making frequent connections to their long-term memory banks or schema and they are activating schema to make what they are reading relevant to what they already know. To relate unfamiliar text to prior knowledge connections usually take three forms: text-to-self; text-to-text; text-to-world.
3. Questioning
Questions are at the heart of teaching and learning. They open the doors to understanding the world. Asking questions allows us to seek out information, solve problems, and extend our understanding. As we try to answer our questions, we discover new information and gain new knowledge. The best questions spark more questions and lead to further research and inquiry. Proficient readers ask questions before, during, and after reading. They ask questions to clarify meaning, make predictions, determine author's purpose and style, focus on unfamiliar concepts, and locate answers. Questions encourage curious minds to investigate.
Questions can be effective because they:
Give students a purpose for reading
Focus students' attention on what they are to learn
Help students to think actively as they read
Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know
By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text.
4.Visualizing
Readers create images in their minds that reflect or represent the ideas in the text. Proficient readers spontaneously and purposefully create mental images during and after they read. These images may emerge from any of the five senses, are anchored in a reader's prior knowledge and emotions, and serve to enhance inderstanding of the text. Visualizing for your students is like creating a movie in their mind while they are reading. When they visualize, they create pictures in their mind that are their own and no one else's. Visualizing is personal and the reader may become attached to the images and characters that are visualized. Visualizing helps keep readers engaged in their reading. Proficient readers use images to immerse themselves in details and they adapt their images as they continue to read. One of the best ways to begin to teach the strategy of visualizing is by using wordless picture books. By taking the clues in the pictures and combining them with pictures we create in our mind, we begin to make meaning. This type of introduction to visualizing gives children a concrete sense of the strategy and it clarifies for them how it works.
5. Inferring Meaning
Inferring is the process of creating personal meaning from text and is at the center of reading. Writers present information gradually, leaving clues along the way to keep the reader engaged in the act of constructing meaning. Inferring is a mental process that involves combining our background knowledge and merging it with clues in the text to come up with an idea that isn’t explicitly written in the text. Inferring may cause readers to slow their reading, to reread sections, and to reflect on different interpretations. Readers draw conclusions from merging their thinking with text information. Inferring involves drawing a conclusion or making an interpretation about information that is implicit. Typically, skillful writers leak information slowly, one idea at a time, inviting the reader to make reasonable inferences. When proficient readers infer, they draw conclusions, make reasonable predictions, create unique interpretations, answer questions, and make connections. When reading fiction or poetry, a wide variety of interpretation is likely. When reading nonfiction, readers may have to crack open language word by word to get at the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts and a narrower range of interpretation is typical. As readers share their inferences, they may revise them based on the inferences and interpretations of other readers.
6. Determining Importance
Determining important ideas and information in text is central to making sense of reading and moving toward insight. Proficient readers make purposeful decisions about what is important in text. What readers determine to be important in a text depends on their purpose for reading and on the reader's schema for the text. When readers determine importance in fiction, they are usually inferring the theme or "big idea" in a story and they are not trying to determine salient information. When we teach the strategy of determining importance, we often introduce it in nonfiction. When we read nonfiction, we are reading to learn and remember information. We need to focus on details and important information and merge it with what we already know in order to expand our knowledge and understanding of a topic. We sort through and isolate details to answer questions, determine the main ideas, identify details that support larger concepts, and highlight essential information. In this way, we teach children to use information to develop a line of thinking. As we teach the strategy of determining importance, we are teaching children to sort out information and make decisions about what information is important to remember and what information is not as important to remember.
7.Synthesizing and Summarizing
Synthesizing information occurs during reading and after reading and it encourages readers to see the bigger picture. It's not enough for readers to simply recall or restate the facts. Thoughtful readers integrate the new information with their existing knowledge to come to a more complete understanding of the text. As proficient readers encounter new information, their thinking changes and evolves and they become aware of changes in their conclusions about text. They maintain a cognitive synthesis and monitor overall meaning and themes as they read. They merge the new information with what they already know and construct meaning as they go. As they sort text into a few important ideas, they may develop a new perspective and then actively revise their cognitive synthesis. After reading, proficient readers are able to express a synthesis of what they have read.
Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
Identify or generate main ideas
Connect the main or central ideas
Eliminate unnecessary information
Remember what they read
Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicit.
Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. Strategy instruction will help children to become flexible, adaptive, independent, and engaged readers. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.
Direct explanation
The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.
Modeling
The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.
Guided practice
The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.
Application
The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.
Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other to learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups and also provide modeling of the comprehension strategies.
Other Strategies
Metacognition
Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.
Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:
Identify where the difficulty occurs
Identify what the difficulty is
Restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words
Look back through the text
Look forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty
The Question-Answer Relationship
The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge.
There are four different types of questions:
"Right There"
Questions found right in the text that ask students to find the one right answer located in one place as a word or a sentence in the passage.
"Think and Search"
Questions based on the recall of facts that can be found directly in the text. Answers are typically found in more than one place, thus requiring students to "think" and "search" through the passage to find the answer.
"Author and You"
Questions require students to use what they already know, with what they have learned from reading the text. Student's must understand the text and relate it to their prior knowledge before answering the question.
"On Your Own"
Questions are answered based on a students prior knowledge and experiences. Reading the text may not be helpful to them when answering this type of question.
Keene, 1997, pp. 53-54
1. Monitoring comprehension
When readers monitor their comprehension, they keep track of their thinking while reading. They listen to the voice in their head that speaks to them as they read. They notice when the text makes sense or when it doesn't. We teach readers to "fix up" their comprehension by using a variety of strategies including stopping to refocus thinking, rereading, reading on. Readers who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
2. Activating and Connecting
The background knowledge we bring to our reading influences every aspect of our learning and understanding. Background knowledge is the foundation of our thinking. We can't understand what we read without thinking about what we already know. Readers must connect the new to the known. They must "activate mental files" before reading. Sometimes, however, our prior knowledge consists of misconceptions that get in the way of new learning. So we have to prepare children not only to think about what they already know, but also to change their thinking when they encounter new and more accurate information. As children read they are making frequent connections to their long-term memory banks or schema and they are activating schema to make what they are reading relevant to what they already know. To relate unfamiliar text to prior knowledge connections usually take three forms: text-to-self; text-to-text; text-to-world.
3. Questioning
Questions are at the heart of teaching and learning. They open the doors to understanding the world. Asking questions allows us to seek out information, solve problems, and extend our understanding. As we try to answer our questions, we discover new information and gain new knowledge. The best questions spark more questions and lead to further research and inquiry. Proficient readers ask questions before, during, and after reading. They ask questions to clarify meaning, make predictions, determine author's purpose and style, focus on unfamiliar concepts, and locate answers. Questions encourage curious minds to investigate.
Questions can be effective because they:
By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text.
4.Visualizing
Readers create images in their minds that reflect or represent the ideas in the text. Proficient readers spontaneously and purposefully create mental images during and after they read. These images may emerge from any of the five senses, are anchored in a reader's prior knowledge and emotions, and serve to enhance inderstanding of the text. Visualizing for your students is like creating a movie in their mind while they are reading. When they visualize, they create pictures in their mind that are their own and no one else's. Visualizing is personal and the reader may become attached to the images and characters that are visualized. Visualizing helps keep readers engaged in their reading. Proficient readers use images to immerse themselves in details and they adapt their images as they continue to read. One of the best ways to begin to teach the strategy of visualizing is by using wordless picture books. By taking the clues in the pictures and combining them with pictures we create in our mind, we begin to make meaning. This type of introduction to visualizing gives children a concrete sense of the strategy and it clarifies for them how it works.5. Inferring Meaning
Inferring is the process of creating personal meaning from text and is at the center of reading. Writers present information gradually, leaving clues along the way to keep the reader engaged in the act of constructing meaning. Inferring is a mental process that involves combining our background knowledge and merging it with clues in the text to come up with an idea that isn’t explicitly written in the text. Inferring may cause readers to slow their reading, to reread sections, and to reflect on different interpretations. Readers draw conclusions from merging their thinking with text information. Inferring involves drawing a conclusion or making an interpretation about information that is implicit. Typically, skillful writers leak information slowly, one idea at a time, inviting the reader to make reasonable inferences. When proficient readers infer, they draw conclusions, make reasonable predictions, create unique interpretations, answer questions, and make connections. When reading fiction or poetry, a wide variety of interpretation is likely. When reading nonfiction, readers may have to crack open language word by word to get at the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts and a narrower range of interpretation is typical. As readers share their inferences, they may revise them based on the inferences and interpretations of other readers.6. Determining Importance
Determining important ideas and information in text is central to making sense of reading and moving toward insight. Proficient readers make purposeful decisions about what is important in text. What readers determine to be important in a text depends on their purpose for reading and on the reader's schema for the text. When readers determine importance in fiction, they are usually inferring the theme or "big idea" in a story and they are not trying to determine salient information. When we teach the strategy of determining importance, we often introduce it in nonfiction. When we read nonfiction, we are reading to learn and remember information. We need to focus on details and important information and merge it with what we already know in order to expand our knowledge and understanding of a topic. We sort through and isolate details to answer questions, determine the main ideas, identify details that support larger concepts, and highlight essential information. In this way, we teach children to use information to develop a line of thinking. As we teach the strategy of determining importance, we are teaching children to sort out information and make decisions about what information is important to remember and what information is not as important to remember.7.Synthesizing and Summarizing
Synthesizing information occurs during reading and after reading and it encourages readers to see the bigger picture. It's not enough for readers to simply recall or restate the facts. Thoughtful readers integrate the new information with their existing knowledge to come to a more complete understanding of the text. As proficient readers encounter new information, their thinking changes and evolves and they become aware of changes in their conclusions about text. They maintain a cognitive synthesis and monitor overall meaning and themes as they read. They merge the new information with what they already know and construct meaning as they go. As they sort text into a few important ideas, they may develop a new perspective and then actively revise their cognitive synthesis. After reading, proficient readers are able to express a synthesis of what they have read.
Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicit.
Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. Strategy instruction will help children to become flexible, adaptive, independent, and engaged readers. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.
- Direct explanation
The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.- Modeling
The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.- Guided practice
The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.- Application
The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other to learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups and also provide modeling of the comprehension strategies.
Other Strategies
Metacognition
Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.
Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:
The Question-Answer Relationship
The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge.
There are four different types of questions:
- "Right There"
Questions found right in the text that ask students to find the one right answer located in one place as a word or a sentence in the passage.- "Think and Search"
Questions based on the recall of facts that can be found directly in the text. Answers are typically found in more than one place, thus requiring students to "think" and "search" through the passage to find the answer.- "Author and You"
Questions require students to use what they already know, with what they have learned from reading the text. Student's must understand the text and relate it to their prior knowledge before answering the question.- "On Your Own"
Questions are answered based on a students prior knowledge and experiences. Reading the text may not be helpful to them when answering this type of question.